Moores Law: Infographic

I detect the odd bit of disbelief in the changes that are expected to digital TV in the coming decade. So I thought it would be interesting to show you the last 40 years and how we have moved from kilobytes, to megabytes to gigabytes in that time.

Briantist: But .. I believe the technology used for the last forty years to achieve those results is reaching its theoretical limit. There are new ideas to pursue, but will the pace of change be faster or slower than before?

It would be equally interesting to look at the progress of disk drive capacity over a similar period. The first one I came across an an electronics apprentice was the IBM 305 RAMAC in 1961. Although it's out of your time period, I mention it because it weighed over a ton and stored 5 Mbytes on 50 x 24" magnetic disks and cost around $160,000 which was a LOT of money in those days

Within your time frame, I was using the DEC RK05 in 1976. This used exchangeable 2.5 Mbyte cartridges and cost $7,900 plus installation. There was also a fixed disk version, the RK05F, which stored double - 5 Mbytes. Both had to be mounted in 19" racks so a full rack of fixed disks would store about 50 Mbytes

Now, 6 Tb drives are freely available, a million fold increase but storage density is even better. Housings are available that will hold 14 x 3.5" disks in a rack shelf so it's about 840 Tb per rack, i.e. about 18 million times the storage in a rack.

This is not quite such a ratio as has been achieved with RAM but bear in mind all these disk devices use moveable heads flying above a rotating disk in a mechanical unit.

Technology has moved so fast now-days. I find it incredible that PC's Laptops now can be upgraded to 32GB of ram... but sell them with 8gb of ram... i cannot see how you would need more than 8gb. I have seen hard drives started from 40mb to 8TB as i have worked in PC field for over 20 years. I do remember when 286 pcs came out then rapidly went to 486+ then it slowed right down for a good 3 years. then P4 came out then it went all the way to icore 3 to 7 as well as AMD. so some point they cannot go any faster. we have it all now so people should be happy with what they got. Smart TV's with media players are very nice idea.. what IF the software for it become obsolete. will it stop working all together? will people have to dump that TV as the smart function no longer works and forced to upgrade? Surely the set makers would have thought a "future proof" extension board bit like a PCMIA card. I just see we cannot forever dump electronic/electrical items forever as it ends up in very poor 3rd world countries where people rip parts out for money just to live.

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